


Five times Bernie Wolfe said 'I love you'

by CommanderInChief



Category: Holby City
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-04
Updated: 2016-08-04
Packaged: 2018-07-29 08:58:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7678153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CommanderInChief/pseuds/CommanderInChief
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And the one time she didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five times Bernie Wolfe said 'I love you'

The rucksack was no heavier than it would be for morning P.T. but her dad had insisted on carrying it for her anyway. _Never too big to be daddy’s little girl_. But Bernie didn’t feel big, nor brave, nor heroic. She was sixteen, barely taller than the average thirteen year old. She’d never driven a car or lived alone or kissed a boy.

And, at the foot of a set of metal gates, topped with neat, uniform loops of black barbed wire, she wished  she were still small, curled up in her father’s lap as he told her bedtime stories of the hero’s that leapt into battle, med kit in hand with a stethoscope hanging around their neck. Safe. Loved. Dreaming.

Funny how, at arm’s reach of the barracks door, it didn’t feel much like a dream come true.

If anything, she felt like she was going to be sick.

Maybe her father noticed because, within a minute of the thought invading her mind, he was behind her, a warm hand covering her left shoulder and a message delivered softly that none of the other girls would hear “It’s not too late to go back.”

“No,” The reply came as a knee-jerk reaction “I want to do this, dad, you know I do. I’m just… Getting my bearings.”

He moved to take her in properly; blonde hair he’d once spent hours attempting to plat. Fingernails gnawed to the quick in a habit that even lemon juice hadn’t convinced her to give up. Elbows still baring the faint trophies of badly-built tree-house floors and uneven playground tarmac. His daughter. He blinked and, in the second it took his brain to register the face behind camouflage and combat boots, he saw a young woman. “Of course you are. You remind me so much of your mother sometimes. She would’ve been so proud of you, you know.”

Bernie’d never quite know what to say to that, so she just smiled, kissed him on the cheek and let the over-powering cloud of after-shave she’d bought him for Christmas take it all away. For the time of their embrace, there was no barracks, no concrete accommodation blocks, no goodbyes – simply musk and chocolate and something else that was, indisputably, home.

“I love you, Dad.”

“I love you too, Bern, now go and make me proud.”

…

Ask anyone on campus and they’d tell you that it’s not unusual for second year, Bernie Wolfe to get asked out on a date. An unwavering confidence paired with the mildly infectious buzz of excitement that followed the trainee medical corps like a stale handover was enough to put her front and centre of the fantasies of half the boys on her course – along with a fair few that weren’t.

But, what made her most attractive was the plain, universally known fact that she was absolutely unattainable; of all the that hovered around her to the point of once physically tripping her over,  she’d never slept with a single one of them.

So, when Marcus Dunne, the stereotypical short, cubby, first-year nerd  who couldn’t go two steps without needing his inhaler, shyly asked if she’d like to go for a drink, no-one expected her to waste a breath in his direction before delivering the inevitable ‘no’.

Perhaps that’s why she said yes.

As love affairs go, theirs was hardly a whirlwind romance. In the first months, they probably exchanged more flowers than kisses. But they were good for each other; she kept him away from the library long enough that within the space of a couple of weeks, he was no longer the go-to for the next cruel joke – and, in return, when she fell down drunk in a some sleazy student bar, he’d always be on the other end of the phone, ready to carry her home.

So, when he received a call from one of her friends the night before her twentieth birthday, he wasn’t surprised to find her in a giggling heap on the far side of a club with boarded windows and sticky floors.

Even with only the occasional beam of neon pink strobe lighting to go on, he could see something wet in her hair. Vomit or alcohol, it was impossible to tell – the air already so thick with both.

“Bern… Bern..”

The song ended with a flash of artificial light and, for a second, the sequins threaded into her dress could’ve ben sapphires. Trust her to still look like a model half passed out intoxicated.

“Bern…” He tried again, gently shaking her shoulder.

“Oh, there you are,” She looked up , eyed glazed and grinning. Drunk, no doubt about it – but conscious, fully clothed (or as clothed as when she left her accommodation, anyway) and, despite the erratic lighting, seemed to know exactly where she was “Come to save me from the big, bad dykes? You’re adorable…”

“Lauren called me to take you home,” One hand supporting her waist, he managed to get her to stand “Let me know if you start to feel nauseous.”

Her mouth was hot against his neck and he couldn’t tell if she was giggling or trying to kiss him “Sush, you’re not listening,” Her lips scoured the spot just below his ear “I love you, you know.”

And suddenly, it didn’t matter that they were in the middle of a dodgy gay club, choking on smoke machine fumes, or even that she probably wouldn’t remember any of it in the morning. Bernie Wolfe loved him, was _in love_ with him. He held her waist that bit tighter.

“Come on, I think it’s about him you went to bed.”

…

The labour had lasted twelve hours

Collapsing back into solid hospital pillows, Bernie felt every second of it. Sore and exhausted, the tiny lump of purple flesh wailing in the midwife’s arms was her only motivation not to fall directly into a stiff, hazy sleep. This was when the rush of mother’s love would come, the kind that limps across deserts and lifts overturned cars and fleas through no-man’s-land, infant tucked safely into it’s chest.

The mid-wife grinned like she’d found the cure to cancer swaddled in a coarse white blanket. Then, the moment that little girls are trained to anticipate since they are barely infants themselves: the baby, fragile as sculpted glass, was gently rested against her chest.

It was heavier than she’d thought they would be, about the weight of a small brick or a medium short-range pistol. It smelt differently too, like sour milk and wrinkled fruit.

Then, finally, big, unblinking blue eyes met her own.

And absolutely nothing happened.

No sparks or fireworks or absolute purpose.

Just a creature, purple and bloody and misshapen and the cold realisation that she didn’t have a clue what the hell she was supposed to do with it.

“Hello…” She tried weakly. That was what new mothers always said, wasn’t it?

The baby, Cameron they’d agreed to call it, outstretched a fat fist, mouth expectantly shaped into a perfect ‘O’.

She offered it her fingertip, before one of the nurses could notice. He latched on without a moment’s scepticism, grinding his gums against the sides of her finger in an attempt to suckle.

“Oh, Bern… He’s perfect.”

Bernie’d forgotten about Marcus, pressed close to her side. Now was the point that she’d turn to him, her smile a sunbeam, kiss him lips and, after pausing to choke out tears of joy, whole-heartedly agree.

But she was exhausted and the infant, for now, was easier “Welcome to the world. Me and your daddy both love you very, very much.”

…

In many ways, Charlotte was easier. The second child, Bernie knew better than to hope for a euphoric wave of purpose when holding her baby for the first time.

Her love for Cameron had come in fragments, collected like water droplets from a tap that’d been unwittingly left to leak.

 _Drip._ Bath-time, after pouring in far too much blue bubble bath and the entire room was a shining snowy morning. Together, they sculpted castles and skyscrapers and rivers until their hands wrinkled from water that neither of them had noticed go cold.

 _Drip_. Ice cream in the park, on the kind of day when the sun radiates into your bones and you almost forget what it is to be cold. Their secret, she’d whispered, with a tap of her nose. He’d bounced his sandaled feet up and down on the shop tiles, leaning over the glass counter as if he could taste the palette of pencil-crayon colour with his eyes alone.

  _Drip_. A last look back at him clinging to the open front door, gently sucking the cuff of his spider man pyjamas. Wide eyed as the day he met her, he’d watched his mother turn around, clutch the strap of her camouflage rucksack and, finally, hesitantly, walked away.

Bernie had never notice the glass filling until it overflowed and, without warning or signal, she had learned to love her son.

And, the night after her daughter was born, when the ward slumped into it’s own eerie twilight of dark corridors and distant machines, Bernie crept out of her hospital bed. The tile had been cold, her footsteps quiet and, when she lay her hand over fresh skin, it was every bit as soft as the old cliché had said.

“No louder than the steady beeping of the heart-rate monitor next door. Bernie whispered to the still black shape in the dark “I’ll love you someday, I promise.”

…

Even by English standards, the night was cold – but, to Bernie’s skin, still hoarding the colour and shine of the honey – a passport stamp of the Afgan sun, it was bitter. Chill bled through four layers of wool and polyester, air meeting flesh like ice-water. The grimy walls of the telephone box may’ve stopped the wind but, pulling the opening of her coat tight enough to restrict the airflow in her trachea, Bernie realised that was only half the battle.

The only real heat radiated from the phone receiver, hot with overuse. She held it tighter to her skull, already feeling the red ring forming around her ear in protest. In a way, it felt good to burn. Familiar.

“Alex,”  Her grip tightened around the phone until her knuckles were the same egg-shell white as frost on the yellowed glass “Yesterday, the comms went down… I was worried about you.”

“Bern, I’m fine. You don’t have to worry about me.”

“I think both of us have been at this game long enough to know that doesn’t make any difference.”

“I know, just… Try to enjoy your R&R, alright? And I promise to still be here by the time that you get back.”

“No trouble until I come home?” Asked Bernie, with a trace of a smile.

“Until you come home.”

She didn’t need to see her to know that her lover would be curled up in the bunk Bernie had finally agreed to share the night before 6,000 miles and stales wedding vows would pull them apart. She could almost hear Alex draw the blanket up, over her shoulders and sink her teeth down into her bottom lip.

Bernie rested her hand on the telephone box glass. The shock of ice to her sensory neurones was strangely comforting. In the time that she’d been out, the evening had finally settled.  She watched her own reflection, pale and shivering as frost melted under her hand, trapping a layer of clear, cold water against the tiny window.

When her breath buffed her face into a grey blur, she didn’t wipe the steam away.

“I love you, Alex,”

The receiver crackled as Alex, slowly, inhaled.

“I know, Bern, I know.”

…

Back in the days of the army, Major Wolfe’s almost famously predictable end-of-shift routine consisted of raiding the canteen for anything that looked warm and less than fifty percent sand before trekking back home to her tent. Sore limbs would have barely touched the stiff canvas ‘mattress’ by the time that she’d shut off for a long, deep sleep.

During her second tour in Afghanistan, it’d become a running gag that you could blast the rest of the base until it was just a mark in the sand and the major would still dead to the world in her tent, snoring over the explosions.

But, at Holby, where she could simply be ‘Bernie’ and no-one gave a damn if her snores could be heard in the next tent over, it was different.

Yes - she’d still wander through the door after an agonizingly long day, stiff limbs feeling as if they were wading through water – but this time, ‘Home’ wasn’t a grubby tent or crowded mess hall.

Home was a person.

Home had eyes the colour of treacle and a low purr of a voice that lifted the hair on the back of Bernie’s neck and sometimes, on lazy Sunday mornings when the room glowed gold with sunlight and nothing had to matter, Bernie wondered how she’d ever survived without her.

“You know, Serena,” Bernie whispered to her lover, who was still fast asleep, sealed eyelids slightly quivering as she gently lifted out of her dream “You’re my best friend.”


End file.
